Your Stories: Ainu, My long journey from Greek and chocolate eggs to cuneiform enthusiasm

The VIEWS project

It started with Greek. One of my (many) children’s books about Ancient Greek introduced the Greek alphabet, and I decided to learn it. I didn’t understand all the letters – how can “ps” be one letter? – so I decided to use these extra letters for sounds my mother tongue Finnish has but Greek is missing. And then I continued to teach my poor school mates “Greek” so that we could write secrets messages no one else could read. Sadly, they weren’t as excited as I was.

Because learning Ancient Greek is available only in universities in Finland, I decided to take a course in Modern Greek when I was around 13 years old. A local Greek-Finnish friendship association didn’t have any age limit to participants, like many other places had. Greek was a lot harder than English and Swedish I was learning at school. Even though I kind-of-knew the…

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Tribes of Farmington Connecticut

Ever Widening Circle

Connecticut was home to several Native American tribes, including the Mohegan, Pequot, Nipmuc, and Eastern Woodland Indians. The Mohegan and Pequot were the two most powerful and largest tribes. They were both part of the Algonquian-speaking tribes, and their populations were estimated at 2,000 and 8,000 people respectively. The Nipmuc tribe was a smaller group that often merged with other tribes. The Eastern Woodland Indians were more nomadic and spread throughout much of the eastern United States. These tribes had a rich culture and believed in the power of nature and spirituality. Today, these tribes continue to preserve their culture and heritage through museums and cultural centers.

The indigenous people of North America inhabited the Eastern Woodlands, a cultural area that stretched from the Atlantic Ocean through to the eastern Great Plains and from the Great Lakes region to the Gulf of Mexico, covering the present-day Eastern United States and…

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An extraordinary gift by King Charles III to Indigenous Americans

The Americas Revealed

Life is stranger than fiction. Almost exactly ten years ago then HRH Charles Windsor, Prince of Wales, received a humorous letter from me, asking for his help in finding precious documents, which had been shipped to his ancestor, King George II, from Savannah, Georgia on July 6, 1735. Since then numerous delegations of professors from Ivy League colleges and the Smithsonian Institute had tried to find these documents, but to no avail. Most people in Georgia didn’t seem to know that the documents had ever existed.

HRH was especially amused by the fact that I seemed to be one of the few Americans, who were aware that the British Royal Family didn’t speak Elizabethan English. I started the letter by stating that if he ever got tired of the Royal business, he should become an architect and urban designer. Charles’ great loves are architecture, urban planning, real estate development, history…

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